In today's environment, a computing system often includes several components, such as servers, hard drives, and other peripheral devices. These components are generally stored in racks. For a large company, the storage racks can number in the hundreds and occupy huge amounts of floor space. Also, because the components are generally free standing components, i.e., they are not integrated, resources such as floppy drives, keyboards and monitors, cannot be shared.
A system has been developed by International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., that bundles the computing system described above into a compact operational unit. The system is known as an IBM eServer BladeCenter.™ The BladeCenter is a 7U modular chassis that is capable of housing up to 14 individual server blades. A server blade or blade is a computer component that provides the processor, memory, hard disk storage and firmware of an industry standard server. Each blade can be “hot-plugged” into a slot in the chassis. The chassis also houses supporting resources such as power, switch, management and blower modules. Thus, the chassis allows the individual blades to share the supporting resources.
Currently in the BladeCenter environment, if one of the server blades fails, an administrator must intervene to identify the failing blade, and unplug, remove and replace it with a new blade. This alone is a cumbersome task. If the administrator further wishes to retain the application and data on the failed blade's hard drive, the administrator must physically remove the hard drive from the failed blade and remount it into the new blade. This process is labor intense, time consuming, and economically costly, particularly if the failed blade is located at a remote site.
Accordingly, a need exists for a system and method for rebuilding a failed blade onto another blade. The system and method should be autonomous, i.e. requiring no human intervention, and easily implemented. The present invention addresses such a need.